Friday, August 12, 2011

Watching the economic experts on TV, or reading their newspaper attempts to explain the wild ups and downs of stock markets from Asia to Wall Street and the collapsing economies in the Euro zone, doesn’t leave me any wiser, but it does remind me of an old Jewish joke.

The old joke is about a Jewish “curse” that goes “May you become so rich that every day you wake up in a different one of your many mansions, and are driven by one of your many uniformed chauffeurs in one of your many luxurious limousines to a different medical specialist. … and nobody should know what’s wrong with you!”

Every day we’re being diagnosed by a different “expert” and, as far as I can see, nobody knows what’s wrong …which reminds me of another old joke.

This old joke is about a guy who goes to a doctor and explains “my head is spinning, my throat is sore, I’m seeing spots in front of my eyes, and I’m covered in a strange yellow rash!” The doctor says “Hmm, have you had this before?” The patient replies, “Yes I have.” And the doctor says “Well, you’ve got it again.”

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To sum up, my analysis of the current world-wide economic crisis can be expressed with the punchlines of two old jokes: "Nobody knows what's wrong with us" and "It seems to be happening again."